Proxima Centauri has an earth like planet!

A new type of telescope to help image our neighbor?
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/69/12/10.1063/PT.3.3395

 

Whoah!

 

Nice piece of fiction.

 

Probably--at least near term.

 

All we have on Proxima Centauri's planet is its mass and its orbit size, and its observed mass value is a lower limit due to orbit inclination.

The planet could be bone-dry, with its atmosphere stripped by its star, or else it could have a super deep ocean. So unless one can directly observe it, all we can do is consider different possible scenarios.

 

That's one thing that has always really irked me about Star Trek in general, at least in watching the show and forming my own opinions.

For example we have our very own solar system with one planet supporting life in abundance, because that planet is in the perfect zone for that to happen. Yet nearly every solar system you see in Star Trek has 2 or 3 or sometimes more planets capable of supporting life, and I just find that a bit too much to believe even though it's fiction.

 

Why?
Venus and Mars would be perfectly capable of supporting life if the conditions were a little more favorable.

Mars being big enough to hold it's atmosphere.
Venus having a little less atmosphere to counter the runaway greenhouse effect.
Oversimplified, but as far as I know they are both in the habitable zone capable of having liquid water.

What about moons orbiting the gas giants?

They are not in the classical habitable zone, but liquid water could exist there as well, thanks to thermal energy and heat radiation from the main planets?

 

I recall a few cases of such planetary multiplicity, but in most cases, it seems to be only one planet.

That aside, there are other ways of getting multiple Earthlike planets in habitable zones. Like having two planets orbit each other, or having some planets be moons of a Jovian planet. Before the recent exoplanet discoveries, I would have been very skeptical of the Earthlike-moon scenario, but those discoveries include numerous "warm Jupiters" and "hot Jupiters", and that makes it more plausible.

To see how plausible an Earthlike moon might be, I consider Jupiter and Saturn. Their largest moons, Ganymede and Titan, are about 1/12800 and 1/4220 times as massive as their planets, and 2.01 and 1.83 times as massive as the Earth's Moon. So a Jovian planet with an Earthlike moon may have to be at least 13 times Jupiter's mass, enough to make it a brown dwarf.

 

The relative lack of planetary multiplicity is likely due to an artefact of the detection methodologies (usually astrometry, Doppler shift, transit photometry and microlensing), which tend to be better at spotting more massive, star-hugging planets.

 

Hmmmmm Thinking of that yeah. Shit I hadn't thought about Venus but yes that one's entirely possible except for its runaway climate. Imagine life now had Venus not been the way it was and that we found a sister planet. Can you imagine how that would change the world?

 

Venus as the dinosaur jungle planet--Dagobah in our own system. It would have been nice. Even the dying Mars with canals would be better than what we now know Mars to be.

Space exploration would have been commonplace now--with those go-to destinations.

Mariner (with primitive cameras) made Mars look even worse than it was--and the Viking probes--surrounded by a bunch of ugly rocks--didn't help Mars rep in the popular imagination.

Had one of them landed near Mt. Sharp--things might have been different.

Had I been NASA Chief Admin--I might have been tempted to play up the face on Mars--and pushed for HLLV missions there.

Well phooey--it was just a mountain--but--thanks for the heavy lifter we can use now.

 

We usually do not see the systems a Federation ship passes over before visiting one with Minshara class planet

 

There's that too.

I'll have to watch episodes again to check but do they show the actual stars these planets orbit all the time?

 

Rarely if ever. And even if they do show them, they almost never DESCRIBE them.

For a show that so proudly sprays its viewers with technobabble, the almost complete lack of stellar classification terminology is kind of disturbing:

Data: "Captain, using a multi-fractal induction matrix, I have managed to isolate the alien vessel's tachyon resonance signature and I believe it originated from one of these three star systems."
Picard: "Well, one of them is a Class-B metal-poor supergiant at 21,000 kelvins, and the other is a Class-L red-dwarf that barely shines, so that K-class main sequence star is probably our best bet, yes?"
Data: <Blank stare, eyebrow twitching>
Picard: <sighs> "Can you narrow it down, Data?"
Data: "I believe I can isolate the exact star system by performing a recursive quantum distribution analysis on the vessel's warp signature. However, it will take several hours--"
Picard: "Fine. Whatever. I'm going to take a nap."

 

Trek has its own arcane planetary classification system. It is true that nearly all episodes no stars were identified from orbit or ground, excluding the system they were in. City has Kirk identifying a star in Orion, but that might not count.

 

They have a classification system for planets, but not for stars. This makes very little sense to me since the best way to find a habitable planet would be to try to look for it in the habitable zone of a main-sequence star about the right size and temperature to support livable temperatures.

 

Now that we've had the election, I think you might be right.

We're still not 100% sure they don't - if it's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

 

And in the sequel to Iron Sky guess what, most of the world leaders and high flyers are reptillian people...... In the movie are actors playing people such as Zuckerberg, Jobs, and so on .

 

They don't talk about stars very much in the series, and of planets, they talk mostly about habitable ones. This may be because of where the action is in the series. Most of us don't talk very much about the Sun or the Moon or the other planets very much unless we are very interested in them, and the people of Star Trek may be similar.

 

One can find the planet classification system in Planetary classification | Memory Alpha | Fandom powered by Wikia and Star Trek: Star Charts | Memory Alpha | Fandom powered by Wikia. The letters are A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, X, Y, Z.

Solar-system examples: B Mercury, D Moon, J Jupiter Saturn, K Mars, M Earth, N Venus.

We have a fairly good idea of what the Earth was like over much of its history, though it gets more difficult at earlier times.

• Cenozoic, Mesozoic, late Paleozoic: M
• Early Paleozoic, late Proterozoic: L
• Mid Proterozoic and before: K

When the Earth was close to iced over around 650 million years ago (Cryogenian) and also around 2.25 billion years ago (Huronian), it was pretty much class P.